The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others. CHAPTER X PLURAL LOVE AND INFIDELITY Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any period of mankind's history. For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives to bear us children and to watch over our homes." When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine appearance, we must draw two conclusions: first, that those men must have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen, second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have had very little to do with their sexual life. Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion. =Plural Love=, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from financial independence. Only a man suffering from priapism could gratify the eroticism of a large number of wives and the latest or youngest wife would naturally receive a larger share of physical attention than the earlier and older mates. The jealousy and hatred thus engendered are in no way minimised by the fact that the custom of certain lands countenances such arrangements. =Polyandry= as it existed in ancient times and still exsists in Tibet, where a woman marries several men (generally brothers) may be more satisfactory for the primitive female. Owing to her physiological make up, and also to her passive rôle in love, woman can gratify several men and receive gratification from them. The neurotic disturbances which may arise as a result of a woman's lack of sexual gratification are avoided by the polyandric scheme of union. But this is the only superiority which polyandry has over polygamy.